Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 03, 2025

• Didier Stevens ☛ Update: search-for-compression.py Version 0.0.4

  This tool is still beta. VBA compression is now supported, besides zlib compression. Option -t (–type) was added so that one can choose the compression type to search for. Possible values are zlib (default) or vba.

• Hackaday ☛ The 1972 INTERCAL Compiler Revealed

  Have you ever heard of INTERCAL? If you haven’t, don’t feel bad. This relatively obscure language dates back to 1972 with the goal of being difficult to read and write. It is the intellectual parent of systems like brainf**k and other bad languages. Now, you can read the INTERCAL-72 source code thanks to a found printout. It will help if you can read SPITBOL, another obscure language that is a compiled version of SNOBOL (which is like an old-fashioned non-Unix awk program).

• Mike Blumenkrantz: Pruning

  Time Constraints

  As many of you have seen, I’ve been deleting a lot of code lately. There’s a reason for this, aside from it being a really great feeling to just obliterate some entire subsystem, and that reason is time.

  There are 24 hours in a day. You sleep for 6. You work for 8. Spend an hour eating, and then you’re down to only 9 hours at the gym minus a few minutes to manage those pesky social and romantic obligations. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for mucking around in random codebases.

  For example. Suppose I maintain a Gallium driver. This likely means I know my way around that driver, various related infrastructure, the GL state tracker, NIR, maybe enough GLSL to rubber stamp some MRs from @tarceri, and I know which channel on IRC in which to scream when my MRs get blocked by something that is definitely not me failing to test-compile the patches before merging them. Everything outside of these areas is out of scope for this hypothetical version of me, which means it may as well be a black box.

• Jim Nielsen ☛ Is It JavaScript?

  OH: It’s just JavaScript, right? I know JavaScript.

• Rakulang ☛ Rakudo Weekly 2025.22 SurveyOverflow

  Several people have pointed out that the yearly StackOverflow Developer Survey is online. Please take the survey and put in “Raku” when being questioned about programming languages (as it is not listed as a standard option yet), so that it may show up as an option next year.

• It's FOSS ☛ CrowPi 3: An All-in-one Hey Hi (AI) Learning Kit With Cyberdeck Feel

  A Swiss Army knife for coding education as this kit transforms the programming concepts into tangible experiences. Learn from more than a hundred interactive projects.

• Ted Unangst ☛ modern software 2025 edition

  Back in the olden times, software was hard to build and hard to use, but remarkable improvements have been made, and entire ecosystems of ergonomic languages are now available. I happen to think the old ways still have some merit, but don’t want to spend all my time staring at the cave walls.

  Gleam v1.11.0 was released today, so let’s give it a whirl.

  vivo:~/work/gleam-1.11.0> make 
  grep: repetition-operator operand invalid

  Off to a great start. I can follow instructions, however, and run the install command as directed.

  vivo:~/work/gleam-1.11.0> make install
  cd gleam-bin && cargo install --path . --force --locked

• Collabora ☛ Industry week in focus: ISC, AWE & InfoComm take the stage

  Next week Collabora will be covering a lot of ground, attending 3 separate events in 3 different time zones: ISC High Performance, Augmented World Expo, and InfoComm! Catch up with us at one of these events.